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If seeing is actually a process of filtering reality, and everyone filters reality is a subjective and therefore potentially different way, then how much in common, or how different, can our experiences of the world be? I wonder, if I were to see the world thorugh someone else's eyes and think with their mind, but keep my own perspective and sensibility, would it seem like a completely alien experience of the world, or would it just be the same... but different?

That's one possible reason for people failing to relate. But remove situational factors like that. Assume that the hypothetical people we're talking about speak the same language and look similar for the sake of the argument.

Forget the 'going into someone's mind thing' - it was a way of suggesting that if my version of reality and someone else's were able to be compared definitively, would they correspond or not. I'm not sure that having a similar brain means that the world is then seen in the same way. For example, people's taste in food is completely different, if they have the same brain as the next person, why would this be the case?

And seeing is definitely filtering. Things the brain leaves in, things it leaves out (how many times have you said "oh I didn't notice that" in your life?), forms and signifiers, seeing something from a certain angle and thinking that that is the way it looks definitively, seeing things from a perspective that do not reveal them in the entirity, etc

People know what cars look like. They go along, the road, blah blah. But obviously inside the car there are complex processes taking place that the majority of drivers have no idea about. So while the everyday usage of a car might be as somethig that you get into that moves you about, the true nature of the car is that it is a complex machine harnessing all kinds of processes that the driver cannot comprehend.

NOw apply that to something else. Voting. Weather. Reality in general.

They are all different. That's why people are different. And factors like environment, education, family life shape the way people think, surely you agree on that... and then diet changes the actual substance of the body, because you quite literally are what you eat after a certain amount of time. So people are going along millions and billions of completely different paths, all comparable on the base level, but all very, very different in the details.

Its not exactly filtering, its more how your neurones and whatnot are affected by, and affect in kind the sensory phenomena that hits them. When we EXPERIENCE the result of this interaction between our nervous system/brains/neurones etc we seem to experience a sensation that Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists call Qualia.

Qualia is the redness that I experience when looking at a nice red apple. What it is like to experience something. In theory there is no possible way for me to experience your qualia since the way you perceive things has taken the whole sum of your being to produce it. In this sense hollywood freak is right to bring in derterminsm and the way we experience the world does seem to be predetermined.

Qualia inversion is the idea hyopothesised by some philosophers of mind in order to aid their arguments against reductive/materialist explanations of consciousness work that claim the ability to reduct the mind to the brain. Talking of a distinction between the mind and the brain (or between consciousness and the body or between subjectivity and objectivity) is really just a category mistake. The one is simply synymous for the other.

Qualia inversion, however, introduces the thought experiment that asks us to imagine that perhaps my experience of redness is entirely different to your redness. Thus any materialist explanation of consciousness would have to be able to explain qualia. Another thought experiment is the Black and White room. Here we are asked to imagine a girl who is born in a black and white room, raised in a black and white room and has thus far lived her entire life in this black and white world. She has also been schooled in and has been able to master all the intracies of cognitive science and knows everything about how sense data is processed by our cognitive make up etc etc. She knows everything there is to know (in a materialist school) about consciousness.

Upon being let out into our world of colour however, she looks at the green grass and cries "so that is what Green is like!"

Ergo - qualia.
I for one don't believe these experiments really prove much and I am on the materialist side. That is not to say that I don't believe that consciousness does not exist, I just believe it is not seperate from the body or the brain. This is the fallacy that goes right back to Descartes. 'I think therefore I am' is only a grammatical necessity, not a logical one. Consequently, Cartesian Dualism has a LOT to answer for!

Questions welcomed.

Futher reading:
For qualia: Thomas Nagel, especially 'What is it like to be a bat'

The 'I' only enters into it because of the fact that we need sentances to have a subject and a predicate in order to understand that.

In any case Cogito Ergo Sum = There are thoughts therefore there is existence, is actually a tautology. It is the same as saying 'There is lightening therefore there is electrical discharge in the sky!'

Why is the idea that being able to think, as a complete reduction of experience to it's barest momentary reality (this is what my last sentence that you weren't able to understand was about), proving existence, so hard to understand?

anything, i'm just trying to clear up a very muddled philosophy, which is what Descartes' was. I am well aware of the point of Descartes thanks, having been familiar with his stuff for almost ten years now! Ask anyone else acquainted with more philosophy than the 'beginners guides' or Wikipedia and they will tell you that that the 'I' in 'I think therefore I am' is not necessary and does not follow from cogito ergo sum.

'being able to think, as a complete reduction of experience to it's barest momentary reality'

Your sentance still makes no sense.

I really don't have time to sit here arguing about fucking Descartes! I was originally just trying to share some of my knowledge of philosophy of mind in order to help your discussion so please do not get so fucking uppity with me over a seventeenth century philosopher.

But that statement is clearly a reduction of a huge amount of ideas into a simple statement. So there is a LOT packed into the idea. And perhaps the literal translation doesn't quite do the idea justice, which is why we have the translation we do.

But one thing that has always fascinated me is what it must be like to be blind from birth. What do they "see" - it must be bizarre! Especially someone incredibly creative like Stevie Wonder. That would be fascinating to get inside his mind.

as a species, we are formed similarly enough to have similar experiences of the world.
Something like different tastes in food is very much due to the "nurture" side of things, rather than the way your brain is actually formed. Different tastes in things are also very superficial aspects of the human brain.

basically, we'll never know. Its interesting, but pointless.
Its like colours. If I see blue as what I think blue is, does that mean thats what it is ? Blue could be something completely different to someone else, yet still relative. If that makes sense. Everyone would still say blue, and the other colour they see would be normal to them, but weird to us.
Cool.

I think about this a fair bit. I think beef tastes a certain way, but you might taste it as something totally different. And we would never, ever know. I could be going through my whole tasting beef as something completely different to everybody else, and there is absolutely no way of ever finding out

hello.
1. I reckon there is probably an exterior world that we all experience.

2. This world has certain qualities.

3. We however can only experience them from our own points of view.

4. This however does not devalue these qualities that we experience. It just makes them different.

Though the question of wether other people experience things in the same way? They might see purple as completely different and refer to it in a completely different way, but something makes it all seem like we are talking about the same thing.

on average, yellow is usually lighter than the other three primary colours, so as we know that tone aught to be the same for everyone, that yellow could never be replaced by any other colour for another individual.

(I don't think the question is well-defined enough to be terribly meaningful - 'if I were to see the world through someone else's eyes and think with their mind' - well then you would effectively BE that person, and not yourself, hence incapable of doing any meaningful comparison)